Steven D notes that Bill O’Reilly is still attacking Shirley Sherrod.
Bill O’Reilly, the first
entertainerpropagandistnews analyst on Fox News to run the edited, out of context Breitbart clip of Shirley Sherrod, walked back his intense criticism of her today. He framed it as an apology. You decide if that’s what it really was, because frankly I call B*llsh*t on you Mr. O’Reilly for daring to call what you said an apology. Because by God it was worse than if you had done nothing at all:Fox News host Bill O’Reilly offered a rare mea culpa Wednesday, apologizing for airing a controversial tape of a speech given by a black U.S. Dept. of Agriculture official that was edited to make it appear she was racist. […}
“I owe Ms. Sherrod an apology for not doing my homework, for not putting her remarks into the proper context,” he said on "The O’Reilly Factor," adding that his own words had been taken out of context by critics in the past. “I well understand the need for honest reporting.”
Sounds good right? Well until you get to this part:
On Wednesday, the host said that he “did not analyze the entire transcript, and that was not fair.” Still, O’Reilly called her a "longtime liberal activist" and said the language Sherrod used suggested that she “very well may see things through a racial prism." He said she belonged in the private sector, not working for the government.
It gets worse from there. (Read the rest of Steven’s post.) Yet, I was inspired.
So, Bill O’Reilly wants to continue to judge Sherrod what she said on two minutes of an old video? Never mind that the point Sherrod arrived at by the end of the speech is one that we’d all do well to strive for. O’Reilly sees fit to ignore that. Never mind that by the end of her speech Sherrod essentially admitted that her previous attitude was wrong. O’Reilly sees fit to ignore that.
And commenters on the right ignore the message Sherrod delivered at the end of her speech, focusing instead on how the audience "cheered" or laughed when Sherrod recounted how she thought the best way to help the man was to take him to a lawyer who was "one of his own kind." Just as they ignore the change Sherrod experienced because of the event she related in the speech, they ignore the lesson that Sherrod sought to deliver through the speech: that race exists, but there comes a point where we must be able to see past it (which is not the same as ignoring it, btw), to see one another as human beings who need each other.
At the end of the speech, Sherrod described how the experience taught her that the lawyer wasn’t the farmer’s "own kind" or one of "his own people." She discovered that she was "one of his people" and he was "one of her people."
But in the conservative worldview people don’t learn and the don’t change (or, at least, it doesn’t count unless people change by becoming conservatives). What Shirley Sherrod was during the experience she describes in the two minutes of her speech is all she is and all she will ever be. In fact, those two minutes are the sum total of her character and all that is needed to judge her. And nothing in that speech could have caused the people in the audience to change, or to rethink their own prejudice or bias? (After all, any real change would have made them conservatives like O’Reilly. Right?)
It’s time to pull this out.
There you have it, folks. The essence of Bill O’Reilly’s character in two minutes of video. That’s all you need to judge him by. Right? There’s nothing else you need to know about Bill O’Reilly. Right? What you see in that video is all of who he is and all he ever will be, and nothing that has happened to him since can change that. Right?
If that’s not enough, here’s a bit more.
Pick any two minutes of these videos. No, actually, pick the worst two minutes or less of any of these videos, and you have all you need to judge Bill O’Reilly’s character. Period.
That’s the way it works, right?
The idea that the man who (allegedly) produced this could possibly be suggesting that a couple of minutes of old tape should be enough to judge someone’s character for the rest of his/her life is actually hysterical.
Why does anyone, anywhere take anything this clown says seriously anyway?
It’s like they’re still trying to edit the video down to the piece they think they can exploit. But any intelligent person who can’t see through this, frankly, is choosing not to.
On the Obama administration, I’m reminded of something I tell my seven-year-old son about dealing with other kids, etc. It goes something like this:
Don’t let someone else control you. Just because somebody says something doesn’t mean you have to react to it. When you do, you’re letting them control what you do.
Take a minute and think: Is what they’re saying true? Are they just trying make you mad? Are they just trying to scare you? Or embarrass you? Or just get you into trouble.
Think about that before you respond. But don’t let what they say control what you do.
That’s what it seems Obama and Co. generally does. So why did they abandon it here? At one time, Obama tried to treat Faux Noise as the shit hole it is. But then they changed. Why? Does Obama really think he’s going to win over one Faux viewer? Independents don’t watch Faux. The dead-enders do.
My suspicions are that this mostly came from Vilsack and his office trying to do damage control, and that the WH is spooked because of the NAACP accusing the Tea Party of racism. That’s why this story came out the way it did too – so that the conservatives could try to get some support for their claim that “blacks are the real racists”. I think the racism stuff is about the only thing that really, really spooks the White House – probably because they know how much fire the conservatives are playing with right now and just how bad things can potentially get.
Breitbart is, in fact, an idiot for editing down her tape that way. Because he was trying to damn hard to make the tape into a “black people are the real racists” tape and what he got instead was a story of a black woman who overcame her own problems and did the right thing – exactly the opposite of what he was trying to do.
Well done.
link
Its nice that after a couple of days the prez could actually get off his ass and try to make amends.
I have a question though, the wingnuts are after the Pilgrim settlement, trying to kill it. Has the whitehouse or any other Dem said anything of late to defend the class action settlement included in an authorization bill (not sure maybe war supplemental???)
Ms Sherrod is a plaintiff and the right is going nuts at the idea of any payout at all and specifically to her.
you and Steven are both on point.
thanks.
Great follow-up to Steven’s post!